All posts by Paul Glader

is Managing Editor and CEO of WiredAcademic.com. He spent 10 years as a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal, covering topics including education, travel, health to metals/mining. He's also written for The Washington Post, ESPN.com, Fast Company, The Christian Science Monitor, The Indianapolis Star, The Associated Press and others. He studied political science at The University of South Dakota and received an M.S from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a certificate in economics from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business as a Knight-Bagehot Fellow. He is Bosch Fellow 2011-2012 living in Berlin, Germany.

The trope of overlooking the hero based on appearances goes back as long as stories have been told. In the Bible, King David, the youngest and least impressive of his 7 brothers, was relegated to the fields to look after goats and sheep. Samuel thought David’s brother was the impressive one and should be king. But God said: “Don’t judge by his appearance or height. People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

Height rears its head again in Star Wars when Luke encounters Yoda for the first time:
Yoda: Help you I can. Yes, mmm.
Luke: I don’t think so. I’m looking for a great warrior.
Or maybe that was less about height, more about being green.

Other heroes overlooked for superficial reasons include Superman (bumbling Clark Kent), Rocky (a bum), and Lassie (a dog). And now, in an example of life imitating art, colleges and universities are not just a place to study this trope; they have fallen victim to it. Based on misleading appearances, higher education is paying insufficient attention to alternative “Just-In-Time” providers.

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Coding bootcamps – the first manifestation of “Just-In-Time” (JIT) providers – are experiencing remarkable growth. One recent survey projected 138% growth from 6,740 graduates in 2014 to a 16,056 2015 – greater than any other sector or program in postsecondary education. But searches at the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education on market leaders like General Assembly and Galvanize produce articles on the South Carolina General Assembly and confederate flag debate – nothing about coding bootcamps or JIT education. And only one accredited university has seen fit to partner with a JIT provider: University of New Haven’s partnership with Galvanize on an M.S. Engineering in Big Data.

If colleges and universities expect they’ll be selling as many degrees a decade from now, they should take a look at what’s happened in the software business. Enterprise software was often called “bloatware” by its detractors because it included so many functions that customers rarely used and came with a big price tag for a one-time purchase, followed by annual maintenance fees. Degree programs are the higher education equivalent of enterprise software: a big price tag for a one-time purchase, followed by annual alumni contributions. Enterprise software is dying as leading software companies have shifted to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models that allow customers to rent software per user per month and pay only for the functions that they need. JIT providers are doing exactly this: shifting from the bloated degree model to an“Education-as-a-Service” (EaaS) model. JIT sells students what they need when they need it. Just as the goal of SaaS companies is to win and profit from customers for life, JIT providers aim to serve their students for life, providing a range of programs and credentials as students’ needs evolve over time.

Rather than focusing on the big picture, colleges and universities are overlooking JIT for three superficial reasons:
1. All the successful examples of JIT are coding bootcamps, ergo the trend doesn’t extend beyond coding.
2. JIT is new version of “Do-It-Yourself” (DIY) education. As DIY hasn’t had any impact, we have nothing to worry about.
3. These programs aren’t alternatives to colleges and universities, but rather “Top-Up” programs for students who’ve already earned bachelor’s degrees.

We’re already seeing examples of JIT programs that demonstrate how flawed these assumptions are. Take YearUp, for example. YearUp is Boston-based not-for-profit that provides JIT pathways to a professional career for underprivileged students. The program combines 21-week educational programs in several functional areas – IT, operations and finance, sales and marketing, and customer service – with a 26-week internship at employer partners. All programs involve IT to some degree, but are not limited to coding. Moreover, YearUp is about as far as you can get from a DIY program; the 26-week internship is guaranteed if students complete the educational program, students receive a stipend for living expenses and are on a strict behavioral contract (with meaningful attrition during the 21-week program). And YearUp is definitely not a “Top-Up” program for students who’ve already earned degrees. The program serves students who otherwise can’t access or are unlikely to succeed at traditional colleges. Now in 14 cities, YearUp serves over 2,500 students each year and 85% of alumni are either employed or in college within 4 months of completing the program: placement rates that are much closer to JIT “Top-Up” programs for graduates of elite colleges than community colleges that serve other low-income students.

There is one, non-superficial reason why colleges and universities might dismiss JIT as a flash in the pan: lack of breadth of the educational program. Like the German vocational/apprenticeship model, or – closer to the U.S. model of higher education – the English university model, students specialize immediately. JIT has no time for general education, let alone distributional requirements. While any impact on quality of life, citizenship and civility remains unclear, evidence seems to indicate that students are unlikely to be worse off economically from early specialization. University of Chicago economist Ofer Malamud developed a longitudinal model comparing outcomes for English (early specialization) and Scottish university students and found that while early specialization is associated with more costly switches upon entering the labor market, differences in wages or employee satisfaction do not persist over time. And with regard to non-economic factors, if JIT providers primarily serve the 46% of students enrolling in but not completing degree programs, any non-economic impact is likely to be positive.

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) is well ahead of our colleges and universities in recognizing the potential of JIT. As the Chronicle has reported, ED is now considering a pilot for universities to partner with JIT providers, allowing Title IV financing for select JIT programs. Based on a recent experience moderating a panel discussion at a conference, where the two participating JIT providers indicated they preferred serving students who already had (expensive) degrees, ED is absolutely right in believing that availability of Title IV funding is key to not only making JIT an affordable alternative for students, but also to opening the eyes of JIT providers that they can be a lot more than “Top-Up” programs for graduates from elite colleges.

Once ED announces this demonstration project, higher education institutions should pay a lot more attention. That’s good, because we need them to solve one real (not superficial) limitation on the JIT model: the lack of a recognized credential. While some JIT providers publicly state that “the credential is the job,” that’s insufficient in a labor market where degrees remain the reserve currency. A much better response is to do the work of articulating JIT programs to recognized credentials, as Lumina Foundation is attempting. When asked by an employer what a JIT course means, much better to say you’re ¼ through a bachelor’s degree program at a recognized higher education institution. By insisting that JIT providers partner with Title IV-eligible institutions, this should be one outcome of ED’s demonstration project.

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JIT has tremendous potential to improve our system of higher education. It improves employer engagement and reduces time and cost to completion (therefore materially improving completion rates).

It also opens up the door to a new revenue model. Remember the great line from The Blues Brothers: “We got both kinds [of music]. We got country AND western.” In the same vein, college and universities “got both kinds” of revenue: tuition AND fees. Unfortunately, both come from the same source: students. JIT providers like YearUp are already generating revenue from a completely different source: employers. YearUp does not charge tuition to students. The entire program is paid for by employers. Most employers are happy to pay for placement if they can be certain they’re hiring qualified employees trained to be productive from day one. In helping to open up this important new revenue stream for colleges and universities, JIT will go a long way to helping to end the stifling and unproductive isomorphism that afflicts our colleges and universities.

If JIT is able to accomplish any of this – let alone all of the above – it will be a true hero: greater than Yoda, Superman, Rocky or even Lassie.

Ryan Craig is a Partner at University Ventures, a venture fund focused on innovation from within higher education.

Technology trends in higher education are making on-campus college degrees feel like terrestrial radio stations. We know they’re on their way out of fashion. The question is just how soon.

A world without physical college campuses seems far-fetched, but there are three important reasons why we’re heading that direction. The first is financial disincentive.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, prices for undergraduate tuition, room, and board rose 40% at public and 28% at private colleges and universities between 2001 and 2012. Predictably, rising prices have also led to higher debt. The Wall Street Journal reported that the class of 2014 was the most indebted class in history. More than 70% of this year’s bachelor’s degree recipients are leaving school with student loans. Students with loans owe an average of $33,000. That’s more than double the inflation-adjusted average from 1993.

An Introduction to Economics class teaches us that all else being equal, a rise in the price of a good leads to a fall in demand for that good. The demand for a four-year on campus college degree is likely to fall because many students simply can’t afford that experience anymore, and those who put it on credit are being rewarded with an impotent American economy where millions are struggling to pay their mortgages, let alone their student loans.

The rising prices of higher education might feel worth it if the competitive advantage of college was rising with it, but the job market is currently flooded with bachelor’s degrees. A college education doesn’t distinguish us from other entry-level job applicants any more than a high school education distinguished similar applicants 10 years ago. The number of recent college graduates as a percentage of the population has doubled since 1970, and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 27% of jobs in the U.S. require at least an associate’s degree. In a recent Forbes article, a representative from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity summed it up well, “We have too many college graduates, not too few.”

As the number of college graduates continues to exceed the number of jobs created that require a college degree, those degrees will become less valuable. This will, in turn, erode the incentive for making the significant financial sacrifice that on-campus college degrees have become.

A third reason higher education is moving away from college campuses is the rise of cheaper alternatives in the form of MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses. MOOCs began and largely still exist as free, stand alone classes made available by growing companies like Udacity, Coursera, and edX that are partnering with dozens of respected universities including Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. MOOC classes are often attended by tens if not hundreds of thousands of students eager for free information. But innovative products that start free and become massively popular don’t often stay free, and recently more and more universities have been offering class credits and even degrees through MOOC classes – at a fraction of the price of on-campus classes. Last year, Georgia Tech launched a 100% MOOC based Master’s program in Computer Science that costs just $7,000 (the on-campus alternative costs $40,000). Similar programs are likely to follow Georgia Tech’s precedent, and the advent of inexpensive MOOC degrees, combined with the rising prices and diminishing returns of on-campus tuition, will almost certainly move higher education away from college campuses and onto the World Wide Web.

Maybe one day, when the current trend in education technology has run its course, in-person classes and on-campus degrees will make a comeback. Maybe in 2050, old-fashioned college graduates will argue that there are intangibles unique to the traditional college experience that simply can’t be replaced on the Internet. But if it does make a comeback, it will be a “vintage” comeback, like vinyl and record players. A loyal few will hold on to the benefits of the good old days, the rest will move on to bigger and better technologies.

Jake Dinsmore is a senior Media, Culture and the Arts major at The King’s College in New York City. He wrote this piece for an in-class essay contest as part of Eng 412: Persuasive Writing & Speaking.

He is right. Researchers and school leaders asking that question are asking the wrong one. The question isn’t whether online or blended learning works—we have more than enough evidence (see here and here, for example) that it does in certain circumstances when done well. Equally so, just because a school adopts blended learning does not mean it will automatically achieve good results. A better question is how to do it well for different students in different circumstances.

This question matters—and receives far too short shrift. It is also among the questions that motivated Heather Staker and I to write our just-released book, Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools. The book is meant as a practical design guide for educators to help them with the front end of creating sound blended-learning environments.

For example, from the get-go we seek to help educators avoid one of the biggest mistakes in implementing blended learning, which is deploying technology for its own sake, rather than to solve a meaningful problem or achieve an important learning goal.

Schools around the world are adopting blended learning to personalize learning, increase access and equity, and control costs. They want to create a student-centered learning system for all students, and blended learning is the most promising way to do so at scale. What the educators in those schools want to know are what are the right strategies and tactics to use so that blended learning boosts each student’s fortunes?

It’s not easy to get it right. When the Education Achievement Authority (EAA), the state of Michigan’s school turnaround district, launched in the fall of 2012 with 15 schools, hopes for rebirth in Detroit were high in many quarters. The system’s first superintendent, John Covington, adopted an ambitious blended, competency-based model for its schools powered by Agilix’s Buzz software. Has it worked? It’s complicated.

The Fordham Institute recently published an important report, Redefining the School District in Michigan, in which it discusses the competing evidence and details the EAA’s many travails.

According to certain measures, the schools seem to be succeeding, whereas other measures and analyses paint a bleaker picture. In Blended, we write about one of the apparent success stories. At Nolan Elementary-Middle School in Detroit, for example, in 2013, at the end of its first year of turnaround, 71 percent of students achieved one or more years of growth in reading and 61 percent in math. Nolan ranked third out of 124 Detroit schools in reading growth. Nolan uses the Flex model of blended learning—a disruptive innovation relative to the traditional classroom—which many schools in the EAA use.

Today’s “years of growth” measures are often tricky though—both to equate to a state’s accountability system as well as to understand what they really mean. Certain assessments that produce measures of growth, including that used by the EAA, do not do so on an absolute scale but on a relative one.

In other words, if an assessment says a student has grown two years, it generally does not mean today that the student went from, say, a “second-grade math level” to the “fourth-grade level.” Instead, the measure is likely comparing that student to others in his “norm group”—students with like characteristics such as level of achievement, age, and so forth. If the student grew more than the average child in that group—which would be calculated to equal one year of growth—then the assessment report would say she grew more than a year.

Here’s the challenge: If students in a norm group toward the bottom of achievement—at the 5th percentile, for example—don’t grow much on an absolute basis, then two years of growth might not be all that impressive. If students toward the top, say, at the 95th percentile—grow a lot on an absolute basis each year, then less than a year of growth might not be that bad. Assessments that calculate growth trajectories in this way could, in other words, bake in lowered expectations for some students and exceptionally high expectations for others.

My takeaway from the Fordham report though is that whatever problems the EAA’s schools have had, it doesn’t seem as though the learning model has been the prime cause of those problems per se. The report’s description of the model was quite positive, and reports by various visitors indicate that the models are working well. Governance issues seem to be more at the heart of the EAA’s challenges.

With that said, the level of execution required to implement a disruptive model of blended learning in the hardest-to-serve parts of Detroit flies in the face of the recommendations from our new book. Disruptive solutions are in general meant for the simplest problems at the outset, not the most complicated that need sustaining, not disruptive, innovations. In general today, sustaining models of blended learning are better matches for core problems. Not every school chooses to follow this advice, and that’s certainly OK, but the caution for schools choosing to use a disruptive model for a core problem is that implementation is likely to require far more effort to explain the choice to the community, prepare for the launch, and execute than if the school had gone with a sustaining model of blended learning.

Given the complex situation surrounding the EAA, that might be a caution worth thinking through.

Michael Horn is Executive Director of Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, the co-author of “Disrupting Class.” He’s a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School. This post first appeared on Forbes.com

Michael Horn is Executive Director of Education at Innosight Institute, the co-author of “Disrupting Class.”

By Michael Horn

In March, Tom Loveless, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, took an outdated swipe at the logic behind moving toward a student-centered learning system. He in essence suggested that because the curriculum wars have been decided more or less empirically, that people bent on disrupting the classroom and the factory-model education system were doing so under faulty assumptions about how students learn.

In his piece, he attacked the logic of teaching around multiple intelligences and pointed to some of the research that shows that tailoring learning opportunities to common assumptions around visual, auditory, and other such supposed learning styles are not good ways of teaching different students.

A problem with Loveless’s argument is that many of my fellow “disruptors” and I who think that it is important to disrupt the education system think this way not under the mindset that it will—or should—help with multiple intelligences or learning styles, but instead because of a simpler and more rigorously tested notion that is far less ideological than Loveless assumes.

Today’s factory-model education system, which was built to standardize the way we teach, falls short in educating successfully each child for the simple reason that just because two children are the same age, it does not mean they learn at the same pace or should follow the same pathway. Each child has different learning needs at different times.

Although academics, including cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and education researchers, have waged fierce debates about what these different needs are—some talk about multiple intelligences and learning styles whereas others point to research that undermines these notions—what no one disputes is that each student learns at a different pace. Some students learn quickly. Others learn more slowly. And each student’s pace tends to vary based on the subject or even concept one is learning. The reason for these differences, in short, is twofold. First, everyone has a different aptitude—or what cognitive scientists refer to as “working memory” capacity, meaning the ability to absorb and work actively with a given amount of information from a variety of sources, including visual and auditory. Second, everyone has different levels of background knowledge—or what cognitive scientists refer to as “long-term memory.” What this means is that people bring different experiences or prior knowledge into any learning experience, which impacts how they will learn a concept. If a teacher assumes that everyone in a class is familiar with an example from history that is only ancillary to the point of a particular lesson, for example, but uses that example to illustrate a particular point, then the students who are unfamiliar with the example or who have misconceptions about that example, may just miss the point of the lesson or develop misconceptions about the point of the lesson itself. This isn’t under dispute.

There is also widespread agreement that, as a result, targeting learning just above a student’s level such that it is not too easy or hard is critical to helping students be successful (Daniel Willingham, who Loveless cites in his discussion debunking the learning-style theory, writes extensively about this in his book Why Don’t Students Like School—in the first chapter). If Loveless had kept up with our writing (not that I blame him for not) or read Disrupting Class with a bit more of a nuanced eye, he would have seen that we didn’t pin our argument on multiple intelligences or learning styles per se—we were quite up front that we are not experts in the learning sciences by any means. Instead, we asserted broadly that students had varying learning needs and used learning styles as a device to illustrate the point. Mea culpa on using that example, as I’ve written more extensively here, but at the same time, it doesn’t refute the fundamental point of our argument that customization—or personalization—is needed if we are to help every child reach his or her fullest potential.

Understanding this helps us understand the logic of personalizing learning and moving away from the current system that mandates the amount of time students spend in class, but does not expect each child to master learning. Because our education system is built to standardize, not personalize, transforming it through disruptive innovation is critical.

This seems to play into one of Loveless’s core worries though, as he seems to have a love for some of the assumptions embedded in the factory model of education. As he wrote, “Moreover, individualized instructional programs, whether delivered exclusively online or through ‘blended’ regimes, are antithetical to the goal that all students learn a common body of knowledge and skills at approximately the same time.” The challenge, of course, with his argument is that today students do not in fact learn or master a common body of knowledge and skills at approximately the same time; they are merely taught them—which is far different from truly learningthem.

Why is Loveless concerned about students learning the same thing at the same time? First, because learning some things in common, he says, are important. I agree. Learning some things in common—of course not all things, but a strong foundation—is important. Again, although I am no expert, the research suggests that a strong foundation of knowledge is critical for future learning and meaningful participation in and contribution to society (but it’s also not sufficient, which is why developing deeper skills and dispositions are so important—a false either-or from which we need to move away). This isn’t antithetical to blended or student-centered learning; if Loveless thinks it is, I recommend he visit one of the KIPP LA elementary schools. What he sees might surprise.

Second, Loveless assumes that because students may learn these things at different times in a blended-learning world, that it will exacerbate the achievement gap—a legitimate worry. We need more research here, but the evidence seems to suggest that the achievement gap is exacerbated in the factory-model system when a student does not master a concept, develops holes in her learning, and the teacher just moves on to the next concept the next day. Instead, what we’ve seen in Chugach, Alaska and elsewhere, is that when we move to a competency-based learning system concerned with rigor—in which students move on to new concepts only upon mastery (and there exists the notion of a minimum pace so students who are falling behind get more attention and gaps don’t grow too big)—that students who would typically be left behind and see their gaps grow bigger and bigger, instead experience a sea change when misconceptions are corrected, they master foundational knowledge and skills, and they can then accelerate much faster than anyone would have expected. Different students also struggle at different points. Who struggles and where is often unpredictable ahead of time—in other words, “the smart kids” group and “the slow kids” one aren’t fixed. Will competency-based learning exacerbate some gaps? Certainly. The most talented students—who we under-serve and hold back today—will be able to accelerate even faster. The hope though is that these gaps will have less to do with race and wealth than they do today, but we don’t know for sure. We do know though that the status quo factory-model system—in my mind the opposite of a student-centered one—is failing along this dimension.

I’ve also heard Loveless attack personalized learning, one of the two components of what I think of as making up a student-centered education system (the other being competency-based education). Loveless looked up studies that purported to be implementing “personalized” learning and found that the approaches weren’t necessarily effective.

The challenge though is in assuming once again that everyone means the same thing by the term or did the same sorts of interventions; simply looking up personalized learning in the peer-reviewed research is too simplistic.

There are lots of notions and differing definitions of what personalized learning is, but when I, and many other disruptors use the phrase, we mean learning that is tailored to an individual student’s particular needs—in other words, it is customized or individualized to help each individual succeed. The power of personalized learning, understood in this way, is intuitive. When students receive one-on-one help from a tutor instead of mass-group instruction, the results are generally far superior. This makes sense, given that tutors can do everything from adjusting if they are going too fast or too slow to rephrasing something a different way or providing a different example or approach to make a topic come to life for a student.

But you don’t have to take our word for it. Studies show the power of this kind of personalized learning for maximizing student success. Benjamin Bloom’s classic “2 Sigma Problem” study, published in 1984, measured the effects of students learning with a tutor to deliver personal, just-in-time, customized help. The striking finding was that by the end of three weeks, the average student under tutoring was about two standard deviations above the average of the control class. That means that the average tutored student scored higher than 98 percent of the students in the control class. Furthermore, 90 percent of the tutored students attained the level of summative achievement reached by only the highest 20 percent of the students under conventional instructional conditions. A more recent meta-analysis by Kurt VanLehn that revisits Bloom’s conclusion suggests that the effect size of human tutoring seems to be more around 0.79 standard deviations than the widely publicized 2 standard deviation figure. But even with this revision, the impact is hugely significant.

The problem is that having a human tutor for each student is prohibitively expensive; so to educate large numbers of students in the early 1900s, we adopted the factory model of education we have today. The logic behind blended learning is that we can gain the benefits of mass customization—many of the effects of a personal tutor in other words—without the costs.

Now, of course, as we implement blended learning, we may learn new things about how learning works. The opportunity to collect empirical data in near real time will be far greater, so we can test out different approaches for different students and see what works, for whom, and under what circumstances. And as we do so, perhaps we’ll learn that learning styles—not the simplistic notion we have today, but, as Jose Ferreira, CEO of Knewton wrote, “that different ways of learning certain concepts are more or less productive for certain students”—do indeed exist.

But we don’t have to believe that will happen for us to believe in personalized, competency-based, blended, or student-centered learning. Of course, perhaps we do need a better vocabulary to express what we mean.

Michael Horn is Executive Director of Education at The Clayton Christensen Institute, the co-author of “Disrupting Class.” He’s a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School. This post first appeared on Forbes.com

One of the disadvantages of a small private liberal arts college is the lack of course options. By my senior year I had 15 credits to finish if I wanted to graduate with my class. My chances of graduating in the spring seemed bleak. Until I learned that I could take online courses at a different college while simultaneously taking a full course load at my own college.

Since my experience taking online classes relates to my timely graduation, one would think I would be in favor of an online education. For one, online, or digital, educations are highly accessible. Online courses work around your schedule. They don’t require you to even be in the same country. And in my case, online courses are a convenient option when needing or wanting to take classes that your college doesn’t provide. However, aside from these benefits, in most cases an online education is a pseudo-education not to be substituted for the real thing. By the year 2050, technology will continue to assist education rather than be the source for education.

With the rising popularity in MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, one would assume that the future of education is found in this online model. Prestigious institutions such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford have made popular lecture courses available through the use of MOOCs. The astonishing rate of enrollments, including tens of thousands of participants, in online courses appear to validate the demand for accessible yet quality digital education. However an online education, even if it is fully accredited, cannot compare to a traditional classroom education.

Last May (2013) the New Yorker reported that “when MOOCs are a purely online experience, drop out rates soar to more than 90 percent.” That means that millions enrolled in these courses never end up completing the coursework. Another harsh reality reported by The Wall Street Journal adds that it is “difficult to verify that students learned anything in MOOCs.”

An online, digital education lacks the ability to exercise fundamental learning functions. This means that it hardly benefits the experiential functions of an education – the verbal, physical and social practices of learning. Online education is a very passive experience, even if there is frequent testing.

In my experience, it was far more difficult to engage with the material in my online classes than in my campus classes. I had no sense of the professor’s tone that dictates what material to focus on and what was of importance in my understanding of the material. The online forums and discussion boards were full of responses filled with platitudes from other classmates, who were just trying to fill their participation requirements. I didn’t have the physical reality of class discussion where I could engage with the material. My online classmates and even my professor held the same sentiments. My in-class education was far more edifying and educational. I couldn’t fathom taking any more classes online, let alone receiving an online education in-full.

MOOCs and online educations are beneficial means of education in some cases that exclude full-time college educations. Stanford’s president John L. Hennessy prophesies that online courses will be effective learning environments aside from the gold standard of a traditional education. He states that “while the gold standard of small in-person classes led by great instructors will remain, online courses will be shown to be an effective learning environment, especially in comparison with large lecture-style courses.” The effectiveness of an online education will suit those who have a keen will to learn in order to benefit their vocation or peak their interests. Companies such as Coursera cater to these people, who are mainly adults with bachelors degrees or working for companies that want to train and educate their employees.

An online education is a promising addition to the sphere of education in few instances. Yet, a digital education will not be able to phase out or match a traditional in-class education. If we try to replace the traditional means of learning in totality, technology may disrupt education and leave us with a pseudo-learning experience.

Eliopolo is a recent Media, Culture and the Arts graduate of The King’s College in New York City.

No, this isn’t another piece about whether the NCAA should permit payment to college athletes, provide enough money for food, or allow college athletes to hold a job. This is about the NCAA’s regulation of students’ eligibility for Division I and II athletics based on their coursework in high school. Specifically their online coursework.

A growing number of students are taking online courses for credit in high school. The NCAA watches these courses to make sure they aren’t some scheme just to give students credit with no learning happening so that the students can continue their athletic career at the expense of their academics in college, the antithesis of what the student athlete is supposed to be about.

In its latest action regulating this space, the NCAA declared that, after this school year, the coursework from 24 schools that use K12, Inc. online curriculum—and often K12, Inc.-employed teachers—will no longer be accepted toward the initial-eligibility requirements.

Why?

It’s not entirely clear because the NCAA didn’t say explicitly. One person there told me that based on student-specific information collected during a review of schools placed previously on extended evaluation status, the NCAA staff determined that “several K-12 schools/programs do not meet the requirements of NCAA non-traditional core course legislation.” Not terribly illuminating.

But according to K12, Inc., it occurred because the NCAA didn’t believe that the teacher-student interaction was enough in those courses—a pillar of learning and a giveaway that the courses lack sufficient rigor, in the NCAA’s view.

Let me ignore for a moment the evidence that more interaction in online learning may not always be a good thing (see here), particularly for novice learners and, of course, depending on the desired learning outcome. And let me leave aside that the NCAA regulations of online learning have historically been incredibly input based as opposed to focusing on what it should care about: actual student learning outcomes (see the perils of the former approach here, even as I have some understanding of why the NCAA does this given the lack of good transparency on real student outcomes in high schools across America and the truth that the NCAA has caught some bad offenders thankfully). And I’ll even ignore the 22 full-time virtual schools that lost eligibility that often educate top tennis players and the like given their flexibility and very different forms of interaction between students and teachers given the asynchronous learning environment and parental involvement.

Instead I’ll just focus on two of the schools I know somewhat well. Silicon Valley Flex Academy and San Francisco Flex Academy. Two blended-learning schools in California where yes, students work on self-paced online curriculum, but also where just walking in to the brick-and-mortar school with in-person teachers present, you can’t help but see students and teachers interacting around learning. Regularly. At Silicon Valley Flex the teachers have worked to incorporate more group, project-based learning, too, for example. There are breakout rooms all around the school where students engage in small group instruction with teachers and labs.

So what is the NCAA objecting to that California, land of input-based regulation for schools, isn’t?

If we move beyond looking at inputs, the two blended-learning schools seem to have reasonable student academic outcomes, too. Silicon Valley Flex received a 789 on the California Academic Performance Index, a measure that rates the academic growth of schools on a scale up to 1,000 where 800 is the targeted score. San Francisco Flex received a 733, not stellar but a score that represents a big and steady improvement from previous years. One would think that this is what the NCAA would want to see.

I don’t know of course what went on behind the scenes between the NCAA and K12, Inc. I have no idea how well K12, Inc. cooperated with the NCAA review. But what I’ve described lends considerable doubt—and, were it not so serious for some of the students who I am sure are affected, arguably some absurdity—to the NCAA’s case across the board. Not a good goof.

Michael Horn is Executive Director of Education at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, the co-author of “Disrupting Class.” He’s a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School. This post first appeared on Forbes.com

What you know determines where you go, according to a new book that sets out to determine why the smartest low-income students forgo the most selective colleges.It’s not that poor kids aren’t as smart as rich ones, researcher Alexandria Walton Radford finds. Nor do top schools turn them down. In fact, she reports, low-income prospects have a big advantage in the admissions process at the most selective colleges.The problem is that few of them apply, thanks to high school counselors and peers who know little about the admissions process, and parents who often know even less.“Colleges must go beyond trying to ease the path of less-affluent students,” writes Radford, who, with Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade, previously wrote a high-profile analysis that found that whites and Asians needed higher grades and scores to get into top colleges than blacks and Hispanics. “They have to tackle their low application rates directly.” Poor students are not applying to elite colleges, “and institutions need to do a better job of finding them and encouraging them to submit an application.”

Only 3 percent of students at the nation’s 146 most selective colleges and universities are from the bottom 25 percent of the income scale. And Radford says it’s not necessarily because they’re less academically well prepared than students at the top.

She surveyed 900 valedictorians at all socioeconomic levels, and found that those from low-income families had parents who were not as involved in helping them apply to college as their high-income counterparts. Low-income parents also emphasized cost more, and were more likely to encourage their children to stay close to home.

“’You’re just going to go where we can afford to send you,’” one low-income valedictorian said her parents told her. “I … had to get a scholarship if I wanted to go somewhere else.”

The public high schools most of these students attended were described as equally unhelpful, with guidance counselors characterized as uninformed—and, by the students themselves, as “pretty lousy” and “incompetent.”

At best, the counselors are overworked. The ratio of counselors to students at public high schools is 1 to 285, and of college counselors to students, 1 to 338. Only one in four public high schools even has at least one full-time college counselor, compared to three out of four private ones.

Nor did less-affluent valedictorians find easy access to information about financial aid. Only 28 percent of parents of students in the lowest income brackets had a good understanding of financial aid, compared to nearly 60 percent of high-income parents, and low-income students also were unlikely to receive accurate or comprehensive information about it from their high schools.

“All I knew is that I asked my dad about it and he’s like, ‘No, we don’t want to take any financial aid,’” one student said. “I guess it’s like a pride thing for him. So I didn’t really look into it.”

The student-loan provider Sallie Mae reported in 2011 that 13 percent of families with annual incomes under $35,000 did not apply for financial aid.

So while more than half of top SAT and ACT scorers from the upper-income category enroll in top institutions, only a third of low-income standouts do. Three-fourths of high-income valedictorians end up enrolling at the nation’s most-selective colleges, compared to 43 percent of low-income ones.

This lopsided ratio comes despite the fact that, when they do apply, low-income students (also described as those with low socioeconomic status, or SES) are more likely to be admitted than high-income applicants. Sixty-three percent are accepted to the most selective institutions, compared to 50 percent of their middle-class peers and 54 percent of wealthy students.

“Given the greater socioeconomic hurdles less-affluent students face, admissions officers may be more impressed when low-SES students reach the top of their class than when middle- or high-SES students manage to do so,” Radford writes.

The book, Top Student, Top School: How Social Class Shapes Where Valedictorians Go to College, is published by the University of Chicago Press.

In it, Radford urges more publicity about need-based aid, better explanations of net price versus sticker price, and better high school counseling.

“Many of our best and brightest students, who deserve to attend our nation’s best colleges and would thrive at them, are prevented from doing so because of their social class origins,” she says.

The information universities and colleges are now providing, Radford writes, is not particularly helpful.

Glossy promotional mailings, for example, don’t sway top students. Many said they never even read them.

“I mean, I haven’t heard of anybody really saying, ‘Oh, I got a letter in the mail from College X and that made me go there,’” one student said.

This post was produced by The Hechinger Report, a non-profit journalism organization housed at Columbia University in New York City.

It took a year for Christopher Nelson to create a course for a new online degree program in philosophy at South Texas College, where he had to squeeze in the job while teaching classes in logic, ethics, and social and political philosophy to students just getting started in the field.

A Kierkegaard scholar and published author with two advanced degrees, Nelson handed over the course to the university when he was finished. Then he did something instructors of conventional courses historically have almost never done: Under rules established by his college, he abandoned all control of it, surrendering any say in how or when the class will be revised, or who will teach it.

“My understanding is, tragically, they can do whatever they want with it,” Nelson said. “This is something of the wave of the future,” he said: Professors create and package the course but then their university employers simply say: “Thank you very much.”

Now, as online courses soar in popularity, a battle is beginning over who should own them. Though little noticed, it’s a fight that could change longstanding traditions about faculty control of classes they create, and influence the future and success of online higher education.

Universities hope to make money off these courses, which can enroll thousands of paying students instead of the few hundred who can fit inside the largest brick-and-mortar lecture halls. But many faculty fear that their work may be altered for the worse, or that universities will employ other, less-qualified people to teach them.

“There’s no clarity in the field right now about ownership,” said Michelle Asha Cooper, president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy. “This is something that will probably need to be resolved, but it’s hard to tackle.”

And getting harder.

About 70 percent of 110 higher education institutions surveyed by Jeff Hoyt, an assistant vice dean at Middle Tennessee State University, have already locked in policies about who owns online courses. And only 10 percent let faculty keep sole ownership.

More than a third of universities claim complete control over courses and materials for themselves, the survey found, and another 41 percent allow for joint ownership—meaning, for example, that professors might own the course materials they write but their colleges or universities keep the multimedia components.

Fast-growing third-party providers such as the Harvard-MIT collaboration edX, which collects and distributes courses from at least 30 universities around the world, leave the question to be resolved by member institutions.

“We don’t own it. The university does,” said Tena Herlihy, general counsel for edX. “The universities create the course and the content.”

No, say angry faculty; universities don’t create anything. They do.

The faculty union at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the only UC campus to have a union that collectively bargains, has been fighting with that school’s administration over intellectual property rights since it was told last winter that anyone who created an online course for the Stanford online-education spinoff Coursera would have to sign a waiver giving up ownership.

Under California law, the union pointed out, individual professors and not their universities own the rights to the course materials they create.

Association leaders say the university has told them that Coursera is retooling its course development agreement in response to “legal concerns.” Coursera, which has different arrangements with different universities, won’t say what those changes will entail, and neither Coursera nor the union responded to repeated requests for comment.

“If you’ve designed the thing, you want to be the only one responsible for updating and revising it,” Nelson added. “You don’t want to be designing a course and then discover that the university has asked someone else to update it.”

The AAUP contends that universities are “escalating” their demands to keep full ownership of online courses and other instructional materials. Among other cases, they cite new guidelines at the University of Pennsylvania to restrict faculty from doing work for online education companies other than Penn itself, which wants the right of first refusal for its professors’ work.

Cary Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said faculty need to show a united front.

“If the rest of your colleagues are going belly up, you aren’t going to claim your rights,” he said.

But many faculty are happy to give up ownership for the sake of being able to reach more students, as they can do online. And universities argue that they are investing considerable resources in the development of online courses and have a right to own them.

Hoyt, in his survey, also found that 82 percent of universities pay faculty extra to develop online courses.

Even as the Santa Cruz union protests, some faculty there and at other California universities are enthusiastically developing and teaching online courses.

Kalju Kahn, a professor of chemistry at the University of California at SantaBarbara, compared online courses to academic textbooks: Professors can decide whether or not to produce them, and there can be varying degrees of ownership for the author, the university, and the publisher.

“Where exactly the line goes, it’s a case-by-case basis,” Kahn said.

This post was produced by The Hechinger Report, a non-profit journalism organization based at Columbia University in New York City. The story also previously ran in Time.

CSM Roger Parker, Jr., (US Army-Ret), has returned to college to study Health, Fitness and Nutrition at Anne Arundel Community College. (Photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

When veterans come home from war and try to put their lives back together, there’s often a giant missing link in their transition: Clear advice on getting back to school and managing the next phase of their education.“Where you are going next is a huge hole in the system, and there is no entity in the community to help them figure out where to start,’’ Pamela Tate, president and CEO of CAEL (Council for Adult and Experiential Learning), said at a hearing on educating veterans in Washington D.C. last week. “They don’t know where they should go to school, what they should study and what careers are there for them.’’A bilateral security agreement between the U.S. and Afghanistan could allow for a lasting presence of troops there through 2024, sending even more veterans into limbo.

That means the road to higher education will remain fraught with challenges for U.S. veterans, some two million men and women who have or will return from Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the next few years.

It’s a sad state of affairs for a country that educated about 10 million returning veterans after World War II – including three U.S. presidents, three Supreme Court justices, 14 Nobel Prize winners and 24 Pulitzer Prize winners.

The GI bill of 1944 transformed U.S. higher education with benefits allowing veterans to attend any institution that admitted them. The bill helped support spouses and children and offered preparation for vocational careers in construction, auto mechanics and electrical wiring, among others.

In recent years, the revamped Post-9/11 GI bill has provided financial aid to veterans and their families, including reservists and National Guard members – but critics say it does not go far enough to ease the transition home.

Today’s veterans are having increasing difficulty accessing their benefits, and may end up wandering around campuses looking for someone who can help them transfer credits, register for classes or provide career advice.

Today’s veterans often have difficulty accessing their benefits, and may end up wandering around campuses looking for someone who can help them transfer credits, register for classes or provide career advice. They are not represented at many elite colleges.

Some are finding themselves deep in debt due to predatory lenders; others scammed by for-profit colleges that lure them in – and don’t deliver what they’ve promised. Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission warned veterans to be cautious before choosing a for-profit school; at one point some 22 percent of veterans chose the for-profit route.

“They may want to use your Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits to boost their bottom line and may not help you achieve your educations goals,” the commission cautioned.

In California, colleges are finding that benefits don’t go far enough. Campuses are stretched as they try to give veterans the help they need and deserve, said Patrick O’Rourke, director of veteran affairs services for the office of the chancellor at California State University, where the VetNet program provides veteran services and support.

“What we do in California for our veterans comes out of our pockets,’’ O’Rourke said. In a recent visit to centers on two California college campuses, O’Rourke discovered crushing workloads and staff members overwhelmed just trying to connect veterans with simple answers about using their benefits.

Tate, O’Rourke and Selbe of UMUC were among panelists at “Success After Service: Improving Postsecondary Education for Veterans,’’ a discussion that took place in Washington D.C. earlier this month in honor of Veterans Day.

Tate of CAEL said too many veterans don’t know where to go to school, how to get credit for prior learning or work experience and what careers are available to them.

They also often struggle to find answers for their unique range of issues – everything from transferring credits to studying full-time while supporting a family to post-traumatic stress and physical injuries.

What most need is career training that looks at what skills they have – and which ones they need, said Selbe, of UMUC.

“Historically at UMUC they come not to get a job, but to get the next job,’’ Selbe said. “So from a career services perspective that’s where our efforts have been, but with the economy taking a dive and vets coming back in increasing numbers, it has not been the case. We didn’t have the capacity or skill set to let vets navigate their way through.’’

UMUC now trains those who work in career services in the unique needs of veterans, Selbe said – a bright spot in the growing recognition of the continuing obstacles veterans face.

It’s important for hopeful signs to start outnumbering the obstacles – especially as the number of veterans and their families seeking higher education continues to grow.

More than 250 community colleges and universities in 24 different states and D.C. signed on to Obama’s “8 Keys to Success,’’ program, aimed at helping veterans and military families afford and complete their college degrees, certificates, industry-recognized credentials and licenses and prepare them for jobs.

In high school, I took Introduction to Economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) as an online video game. Students participated as virtual aliens that dropped down to a deserted earth and tried to make a thriving economy. There were a few quizzes and readings along the way, but I spent most of my time playing a video game.

I learned nothing about economics that semester. Instead, I learned how to play a game in a way that made me seem like I knew a lot about economics. Maybe I learned nothing because online education is sub-par, or maybe it was because I was a lazy high school student that didn’t care about economics yet. Whether you think online education is good or bad, at the center of the virtual education conversation is a fundamental disagreement about the nature of knowledge and how people come to know.

Universities and organizations are creating lots of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in an effort to make education available to thousands more at a fraction of the cost. Some educators are wary about potential dangers of online learning. The question at the heart of the discussion is this: is online learning (excluding its convenience and affordability) the best way to become knowledgeable?

If knowledge is a thing that people either have or don’t have, then online education makes sense. According to edSurge, an online publication that helps educators find the best education technology, in December 2013, more than 10 million people participated in 1200 MOOCs last year. That’s about 8,300 students per class. Students tune in to the course and soak up information through video lectures, readings and online quizzes.

The assumption is that knowledge is like a substance that can be passed on, and therefore participation in this method will create knowledgeable students. The nature of MOOCs treats knowledge like data. They presume that if we just give people more, then they will be more skilled and more knowledgeable.

Recent research in the field of Epistemology takes issue with this assumption. In her book Longing to Know, Geneva Collegephilosophy professor Esther Meek explores the research of philosopher Michael Polanyi and proposes that knowledge looks less like “amassing information” and more like embodying a process.

In addition, philosophy professor Alvin Goldman argues in Knowledge in a Social World that education should pursue “shaping skills and techniques that facilitate autonomous learning and steer inquiry towards truth.” This method requires a process with an authoritative guide and an atmosphere that encourages learning. In other words, education should do more than just give people knowledge—it should create good knowers.

If knowledge is less like data and more like an embodied process, then MOOCs might be dangerous in relation to good knowing. It seems true that MOOCs are making some form of knowledge more accessible and affordable. However, most MOOC students do not have access to the authoritative guide or learning environment that modern epistemologists are calling essential to true knowing. In addition, only 4% of people enrolled in MOOCs find the diligence to complete the course.

The danger of removing the embodied process and authoritative guide from knowing creates a risk similar to my high school online experience. Students could end courses with no more understanding of a subject than they began with. Or worse, they could end with a distorted form of knowledge.

As a college freshman, it took me an entire semester of an embodied Introduction to Economics class to correct some of my erroneous knowledge from high school. I had to learn that supply and demand analysis wasn’t actually related to a certain number of mouse clicks from my right pointer finger at the right time, but that it involved a larger concept that I could only grasp with the help of an authoritative guide.

So what does this mean for online education? Do online courses help students arrive at the same form of knowledge that traditional learning does? According to epistemologists, they don’t. But that doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water.

MOOCs were originally created through a for-profit educational technology company (Coursera—now one of many MOOC providers), but many universities are beginning to adopt the idea. The technology of online education has proved useful in the education world, but universities should use caution with these tools when trying to create knowledgeable students. As a solution, several universities have added online lab assignments, discussion forums, and video calling in addition to a classroom experience.

The goal of making education more accessible and affordable is a noble one. However, it would be a tragedy to produce erroneous knowledge in the process. The end goal in improving the higher education system should always be teaching people how to arrive at truth and embody the process of knowing with discernment. The MOOC world is currently absent of this necessity, but it doesn’t have to be. Every opinion around this issue contains a particular understanding of knowledge itself. A reevaluation of our understanding of knowledge could lead to affordable, accessible education that also creates good knowers.

Calhoun is a junior majoring in Media, Culture and the Arts (with a minor in Theology) at The King’s College in New York City.